The Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot is a new discovery for me, and I find her work often very delightful. What I like about her art is exemplified by the painting In The Dining Room. It is the opposite of a ‘posed’ scene, rather like a snapshot taken by mistake with a digital camera. The view is a glimpse of life as it goes about its business otherwise unobserved — a fleeting moment that just happened to be captured. But of course, in reality the little scene is beautifully composed, with four basic shapes and colours that draw the eye into the picture and around it: the glowing vase object, the mantelpiece, the woman drying or polishing dishes (?), the fine wood table. And even though everything has a swish, as if swirling through space at speed, the shine and texture, smoothness and hardness of the objects strike you immediately: that vase is glassy, that dress is silky. The modelling is gorgeous: you sense the warm body within that dress, you feel you could tap her on the shoulder. The intricacy of the plaited bun is conveyed with a few economical strokes — and we completely believe in that hair, just as we believe that the table has high polish and the mantelpiece is polished stone. The whole effect is unlaboured, almost dashed-off, without in any way seeming slapdash or insufficiently observed. It is a masterpiece of pictorial poetry, and the fact that it is a domestic scene, about which poetry so rarely if ever concerns itself, is just a bonus.